David Dunn swims his way to three medals

David Dunn is a man on a mission and it looks like he’s up to the challenge.

The 33-year-old Prince George Special Olympics swimmer turned into a sleek torpedo when he hit the water to start swimming the 100-metre individual medley at Prince George Aquatic Centre — the first race of the Friday afternoon session in the Special Olympics BC Summer Games.

As fast as Dunn was, Magnus Batara of Nanaimo was matching him, stroke for stroke.

After two lengths of butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke they got into the final freestyle foray and it was too close to call who actually touched the wall first but the timers had their stopwatches ready and determined Dunn won it by a mere 14-hundredths of second, finishing in 2:51.14, just ahead of the 33-year-old Batara (2:51.28).

‘”The 200 IM is my favourite event,” Dunn said. “I get to go fast.”

Dunn took four seconds off his previous best time in the event.

He also won gold in the 100m freestyle and took bronze Friday in the 100 m breaststroke.

Dunn loves longer races and on Saturday he’ll swim one of his other favourite races, the 200 freestyle. He also advanced 100 freestyle and 50 m butterfly finals.

Dunn competes against mainstream athletes and he’s hoping to qualify for the BC Summer Swim Association provincial meet, Aug. 15-17 in Prince George. The Cariboo regional qualifying event is set for Aug. 2-3, also at the Aquatic Centre.

“His dream is to swim at provincials, just to qualify,” said David’s mom, Suni. “He’d be swimming against people from all over BC. Some of them are university-level athletes and coaches so just to be able to qualify to swim with them is his goal this year.

“He’s qualified before, but wasn’t been able to make it. It was too far away.”

Swimming has been a big part of David’s life for 16 years and it opened up the Special Olympics world to him. He also got involved in racing on snowshoes, basketball, soccer and track and field (running the 400m, 800m and 3,000m events and long jump).

Swimming and basketball are his two favourite sports and his six-foot-one height serves him well in both.

The Dunn family was involved in the adaptive swimming program at the Four Seasons Pool downtown when someone suggested they sign up David for Special Olympics. He’d never had a lesson, but was able to swim one length of the pool and that was all it took.

“We signed him up and he was a diamond in the rough, very strong, but he‘d never learned how to swim and we don ‘t have swimmers in the family and with Special O he started racing and having some potential,” said Suni.

Special Olympics BC recognized they had a gem in their midst and David was picked for two provincial Summer Games. He also went to Sherbrooke, Que,, for the Canada Summer Games in 2013 and raced at the Western Canada Summer Games in 2015 in Fort McMurray, one of only four Special Olympics athletes selected for the BC team that year.

“What we learned from that is David had a lot of power but he needed to fine-tune it and learn some finesse, like diving in and doing quick turns and long pullouts (underwater movements at the start or after a turn), so they recommended that David get some training,” said Suni.

David joined the Prince George Pisces Swim Club and now works with Pisces coach Ian Williams refining his strokes. He’s taught him all about pull outs and doing the dolphin kick to shred seconds off his times.

“They welcomed him from Day 1 and he loves it,” said Suni. “It actually was more of a younger-kids swim club but they’ve developed a masters program so David could be included and now they have a very strong masters group that David trains with. The masters has gone from just David to 16 to 20 members.”

Suni and her husband Lorne don’t ever have to push David to go to swim practices four times a week or weight training sessions at the Family Y. All that motivation comes from within.

“He was super-excited to have the BC Summer Games here, he really wanted to make the Pisces proud,” said Suni. “He’s still getting best times, this year he’s had seven or eight best times, and he really wants to show them how their support has helped him come along.”

The Cariboo-North East (Region 8) swim team coached by Brittany McDonald of Quesnel and Kerrie Secor of Prince George has eight members, including Dunn, Brooklyn Sherba, Dallas Poole and Carla Caputo of Prince George; and Aaron Allinson, Jacob McKenzie and Tyler Kint of Quesnel. Paulette Prosk of Quesnel made the team but is injured and won’t compete this weekend.